Dnyarri (Star Control)
The Dnyarri were an ancient, extremely evil, highly intelligent and lazy race capable of mental compulsion (a single Dnyarri could psychically controling an entire planet) They resembled large, brown toads with two suckers at the end of each of the four legs, a grossly pulsating skull and sinister looking face. Their discovery by a young Ur-Quan scout allowed the psychic Dnyarri to quickly dominate the Sentient Milieu. The Ur-Quan were enslaved for thousands of years under the Dnyarri's yoke, and were eventually split in to the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za and the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah The Dnyarri favored the Ur-Quan over the other species of the Milieu, due to their weak resistance to mind control. They used the Ur-Quan to wipe out many member races of the Milieu over time. During this period, the Dnyarri re-engineered the Ur-Quan DNA into two types, the green (Kzer-Za) who were the political leaders and scientists, and the black (Kohr-Ah) who were the builders, warriors, and general "do"ers. After the Dnyarri had grown complacent, and had given some time free to the Ur-Quan, the Green Ur-Quan researcher Kzer-Za found out that the Dnyarri had to disconnect from a slave's mind if the slave experienced extreme pain. Kzer-za broadcast this discovery to the rest of the Ur-Quan, who started inflicting pain and agony upon themselves to relinquish their minds from the Dnyarri control. The freed Ur-Quan slaughtered the Dnyarri en masse. Death wasn't a good enough punishment for the Dnyarri in the eyes of the Ur-Quan. As they had been engineered, so too did the Ur-Quan re-engineer the Dnyarri into sub-sentience, making eternal slaves of them, using them to communicate for them whenever they communicated with a species they felt was less advanced than they were (which was often). These Talking Pets are used aboard all Dreadnought and Marauder vessels. The Arilou recently found a Talking Pet in the wreckage of a Dreadnought at Alpha Pavonis VII. They took it to the Umgah at Beta Orionis to heal it back to health. The Umgah, unfortunately, nursed it back to full, sentient, evil health, complete with its mind control powers. The Arilou, Chenjesu and the Ur-Quan describe the Dnyarri as the most evil race known to this galaxy. The Taalo fled to *Pretty Space* because of the Dnyarri, at least according to the Orz. History One Ur-Quan scout discovered a planet, later known as Glilandy, that showed readings particularly reminiscent of Precursor artifacts. Unfortunately, those readings turned out to be generated by the emanations of an incredibly powerful race of psychic sentients known as the Dnyarri. Unfortunately, Ur-Quan minds are particularly susceptible to psychic manipulation, and at the very moment the Ur-Quan scout landed on the planet, his mind was seized by the Dnyarri and examined. Learning of the immense wealth of resources and labor to be had in the Sentient Milieu, the Dnyarri forced the Ur-Quan to return to the Milieu capital planet with hundreds of Dnyarri as cargo, and within a month the Dnyarri had seized control of all Milieu races and spread themselves throughout the Milieu, using the industry of a hundred worlds for their own vulgar amusements. The Taalo were immune to Dnyarri control; thus, they had to resort to brute force for dealing with them. The Dnyarri compelled the other Milieu races to raze the Taalo homeworld. The Taalo did not fight back (though it is possible that they fled to *Pretty Space*). To this day, the Ur-Quan still feel guilty for this barbarous act, even though they were under mental control and had no choice. The easily compelled Ur-Quan were the favoured slaves of the Dnyarri, and the agents of the extermination of several races deemed "worthless" due to their inefficiency and lack of speed, such as the Drall and the Yuli. As time went on, the Dnyarri decided to use the Ur-Quan's own science to genetically engineer the Ur-Quan into physically distinct subspecies or castes to perform certain tasks. One group of Ur-Quan were optimized for intellectual tasks, performing scientific and engineering research to improve the Slave Empire's infrastructure and conducting administration and management on the Dnyarri's behalf. The other Ur-Quan, meant to serve as manual laborers and soldiers, were optimized for strength and diligence in performing manual tasks. The brown exterior of the Ur-Quan originally disappeared in these genetic alterations, leaving the administrative Ur-Quan with a green skin, and the workers with a black skin. After twenty five centuries, the Dnyarri grew lax in their dominance, and loosened the mental chains connecting them with their slaves, at times even allowing temporary moments of self-control. A Green Ur-Quan scientist named Kzer-Za, during such a moment, realized that the Dnyarri masters disconnected from dying slaves in order to avoid being dragged down into death as well. Once Kzer-Za was assured of this fact, he seized an opportune moment to inject himself with a lethal dose of acidic poison. His extreme pain and impending death forcing the Dnyarri to release his mind, Kzer-Za broadcast an extremely powerful transmission across the whole planet and into space, making public his discoveries. Upon hearing Kzer-Za's message, Ur-Quan everywhere began a mass movement, seizing any moment of weakness on the part of the Dnyarri to injure themselves in any way possible, inflicting whatever pain and physical trauma was necessary to distract the local Dnyarri controller enough to track it down and kill it. The Ur-Quan gained longer and longer periods of self-control, during which they developed a variety of torture devices such as the Excruciator, a device that could be implanted in an Ur-Quan brain and provided gruesome levels of agony that left the Ur-Quan physically functional yet continuously protected against psychic domination. The Ur-Quan finally succeeded in purging the Slave Empire of the Dnyarri. Only a few scattered, terrified Dnyarri remained, on the planet Glilandy, for which the Ur-Quan decided that death was not fitting enough a punishment. Instead, the Ur-Quan used their genetic engineering skills to transform the Dnyarri into nonsentient biological tools, the Talking Pets, to perform the most demeaning task of translating to and from the languages of alien races, whom the Ur-Quan now deemed grossly inferior. All of the surviving Ur-Quan rebels had only survived by subjecting themselves to intense, continuous pain for years. Driven by a deep, core conviction that their enslavement was an aberration that must never happen again, and that had been allowed to happen by the Ur-Quan's weakness in allowing other species to exist freely, they established two radical, different paths to ensure their eternal freedom. However, while the two resulting paths appear overtly insane to other sentients, the enslavement by the Dnyarri and the induced pain necessary for revolt significantly traumatized the Ur-Quan race as a whole such that they see the paths as internally reasonable and acceptable behavior.2 Notes and references :1From the 1998 IRC chat with Toys for Bob (Fwiffo is both Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III here): :: i wonder what a dnyarri ship would look like. :: About Dynarri Ships: They are lazy as they are evil. They would never work up a sweat designing or building anything new when they could just take a ship technology from a thrall race. :2Role Playing Resource Guide, p. 24. 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